Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @07:08PM
from the up-close-and-personal dept.

GenieGenieGenie writes "After all the talk of printed guns and the problems they pose to traditional methods of perimeter security, we get a live demo courtesy of some rather brave journalists from Israel's Channel 10, who took the plastic weapon known as the Liberator past security into the Israeli parliament, and held it within meters of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I say brave because had they been caught pulling this stunt, which involved taking their toy out of the bag while sitting in the audience of a speech by the prime minister, they would have faced some real steel. Haaretz has the video (sorry, Hebrew only at the moment) [Google-translated version of the article -- Ed.] where you can follow the breach (from ~6:30) and see them pass the metal detector and the moment when the gun comes out. The movie also shows some testing of the gun in a police-supervised weapons range. Parliament security officials said that 'this is a new phenomenon and they are checking the subject to give it a professional solution as quickly as possible.' I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this." Would-be Liberator printers, take note: the testing shows the barrel violently separating from the rest of the gun.

this will get compounded when these 3-D printed weapons are actually made up of parts which on their own have a look and feel and a different functionality. And imagine when they are able to get these 3-D weapons to be made of alternate, yet compatible parts. Things will just get a little more..... interesting..

Which is part of a broader idea... whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors?

Sure it made sense a while back, the same way that assuming computers would remain analog, that the locomotive was the most reliable way to travel long distances, or investing in Zeppelin futures was a sure fire win.

Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors? Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

If non-metallic guns were truly viable, they would have been used 20 years ago to sneak past metal detectors and kill judges and politicians and airplane pilots. Plastic manufacturing has been around for a long time, the only thing 3D printers do is reduce the cost. There are well-funded spy agencies and a few individuals who would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single gun. And yet none has materialized: [1] [thefirearmblog.com] [2] [straightdope.com] [3] [urbandictionary.com]

Or you could say "if nukes were a truly viable way for small of non-state actors... clearly they would have been used decade ago"both are equally false. As time, technology, and availability of information increase... the ease of constructing such weapon increases and we will see their eventual use.

No doubt you thought the same about malware and viruses a few years back.

At any given point in the technology curve, it's going to be easier to make a plastic gun in a real factory with a $10 M research budget than with a 3D printer. Yet there are no plastic guns. I've heard of mostly-ceramic uppers with steel springs, but a good spring is a requirement even for a revolver.

What you get with plastic is what we see: a zip gun that's good for 1 shot if you're lucky. You can make a wooden cannon too, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Mass produced? No... but for the purposes of US federal law both the 3d printed Liberator and the AR lower Defense Distributed created are classified as firearms.

For those who want a reliable and long lasting firearm... today they will go with a metal one.

If however someone doesn't care about it lasting a long time, being able to be shot multiple times, but is worried about detection... then making something plastic is the way to go as sometimes... a single lucky shot is all yo

Plus, guns in the US are required by law to have enough metal in them to set off a metal detector. For a big manufacturer, if you have to include metal for that, you might as well make the whole thing out of metal given all the other benefits in mass production.

then making something plastic is the way to go as sometimes... a single lucky shot is all you need.

Igw's point still stands. While I'm sure it'll happen at some point, nobody to date has been killed, or even faced a serious assassination attempt, by an assassin attempting to use a plastic gun. Not even the CIA's rather incompetent and rather silly attempts to assassinate Castro, at one point attempting to poison his cigars, has attempted the use of a plastic or otherwise non-metallic firearm.

The Liberator is printed using the same ABS plastic that Legos have been made from for decades. Just like legos

The reason expensive undetectable guns haven't materialized is lack of demand. Spy agencies aren't going to pay for a million dollar weapon since if their agent is caught, having an exotic expensive weapon is a giant neon glowing sign that says "state sponsored assassin". Besides, 20 years ago the suicide bomber wasn't a thing. Now it is, folks that seriously want to kill judges, politicians, and airplane pilots take everyone else down with them.

Well said, plus, state actors have other tools at their disposal. Why go with a one off and rather expensive gun... when you can poison someone with polonium 210 [wikipedia.org], or with ricen and an umbrella [cnn.com], or just a group of assassins [wikipedia.org].

Government actors like to get away with what they did and with minimal traces... individuals are not always as caring... which brings us to another aspect, to quote Without Fail by Lee Child::

"John Malkovich was looking to take out the President of the United States, and Edward Fox was lo

Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.

Or you could have a chat with EL AL who despite being the target of multiple hijacking attempts... has only been successfully hijacked once. An airline that once on board and inflight... you can expect to be handed a steak knife to go with your dinner because they know you not to be a threat.

Far too many items can be legitimately purchased off a shelf, built or crafted into a potential weapon than can be detected. The goal is not to prevent them from being carried on an aircraft (or to be in the proximity of a high ranking government official)... but instead to identify the person who is a threat and is likely to use such an instrument (or worse) against a target.

Well, not just profiling. Having competent, highly trained (and properly trained) security personnel. Sure, Israel is a small country, with a fraction of the air travelers and air ports that the US has. But with the amount the US is spending on the TSA, I'm pretty sure they could do a good job funding an Israeli style system.

An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).

Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and

Let alone the fact that all international travel enters Israel through 1 (ONE!) airport. The Israeli method doesn't scale well. What works for them is impossible in a larger country with a multitude of entry vectors.

It scales fine. Two airports? Two scanning stations. There is no scaling issue.

Explain to me how, precisely, you propose to expand the threat scope from Israel's to the United States', implement it at every controlled airport in the US, screen and train enough agents to support it at all those locations, admin it nationwide, and mollify the huge identity politics movement in the US that will scream RACISM at the very notion of *not* consciously ignoring every single quantifiable attribute of the individuals you are evaluating as threats.

You can not, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with technicalities of airport-side implementation. In Israel, this kind of thing exists because it had to evolve because of a real existential threat. If you replicate this methodology to an environment that does NOT have such a threat - that is, to any country that isn't Israel - it will not work. How are you going to train airport security personnel if there's no century of experience with specific tactics, and no national security mechanism? Americans seem to think they've got it rough because NSA may have been reading their emails. In Israel, there is a national identity database, which includes references to relative, and every person has a number. Let me give you an example. I went to a bank for a bank-signed deposit for my landlord. The teller asked for the landlord's ID number to be put on the writ. I called him on the cellphone and asked, repeating the number aloud. Then I asked him to repeat it once again to be sure. By the time he finished, the teller had, read this, a printout with his phone number, address, face, and situation in the debt registrar. Remember the assassination of Hamas chief in Dubai? It was blamed on Israel, but nobody in the world paid attention to the fact that the copy of national identity database HAS BEEN LEAKED TO TORRENT SITES EVERY YEAR FOR A DECADE, and it occured to nobody that the stolen identities of Israeli citizens that the assassins used could've easily come from there. And now they are adding a biometric component to the national identity database that so far has failed basic security requirements ("biometric database" here being Excel files over plaintext HTTP).

In Israel, we can tolerate this invasion of privacy, and ethnic/racial profiling, because it would be suicide not to resort to it. But nobody else should marvel at it, and nobody else should try to replicate it. It is something we have by necessity, not because we were sitting around on our collective zionist assess contemplating what to do and somebody was all like "Hey! I know! Let's make the most awesome, invisible and efficient racial profiling system in the world."

I'm Israeli, so there may be some bias there, but the last time I traveled to Israel, the screening and check were done not on the Israeli side, but rather then US side (LAX, specifically). If you think about it, that sort of makes sense -- you don't figure out if someone's out to hijack your airplane after they deplane:)

(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).

>>(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).

No it wasn't. "Depart" is what happens when the plane pulls away from the gate, and is about to take off. "Deplane" is what happens when the plane pulls into the gate at its destination, and people exit. They are two completely different words for two completely different circumstances, when used in the context as he did.

(Sure you could say "depart the aircraft" to mean the latter circumstance, but "deplane" says the same thing with the eloquence of using the proper term [lmgtfy.com].)

It's funny to contrast Israel to identity politics, when identity politics is literally the foundation of the country. It's an oppressed minority that seceded and set up its own country where they dominate.

An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).

Except that the "TSA Pre" system is approaching this in some ways. People who have been pre-screened and/or selected by other criteria (e.g. extremelyfrequent fliers) have a somewhat reduced (and currently much faster) security screening procedure.It's not exactly the same, but it does have some commonality.

An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).

Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and use their union to protect their do-nothing jobs while extorting more and more taxpayer money from the very people subjected to them.

That's asinine conservative clap-trap. What you are discussing is typical LEO profiling in the USA where dark skin is used as a cheap and poor substitute by the lazy and incompetent, which blinds us to very real threats (Timothy McVeigh anyone?). Racism doesn't just harm minorities, it also blinds us to both the potential achievements/contributions of the minority group *and* makes us ignore the threats that look like the majority.

An Israeli-style system requires a literal army of very personable, often friendly, intelligence officers who walk around both in plain clothes and uniforms, chatting people up about their life, their family, their trip. That's true profiling. You have to get a feel for the person and whether they are being evasive or acting nervously. Red flags mean extra screening. As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first). This means you can't pay crap wages and demonize them as tax-sucking leeches; you need decent pay and benefits.

Typical conservative nonsense... cut taxes, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting workers, hours, and benefits, demonize government employees, then point to an under-staffed and demoralized agency as proof government doesn't work, thus justifying cutting back even further. Use the small surplus in boom times to justify another tax cut, then wait for the inevitable downturn and temporary deficit to justify repeating the cycle all over again. Make sure to throw in rants about political correctness, drum up a fake "war on Christmas", etc for good measure. It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.

so you take the cash being spent on the machines and invest that into the people. What kind of budget does the TSA have? I am sure if they didnt spend millions on machines that they use for a few years and throw away and instead hired the super qualified people as you describe it just might work.

An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).

Maybe, but unlikely. The real reason it won't happen is because it would cost 1000x what the TSA costs now. The TSA is only useful today because there is effectively no threat, so all their incompetencies don't matter.

If the US ever finds itself in a situation like Israeli, the war will already have been lost.

While they do have profiling, it is not the profiling people in the US think of. It is not religious or racial profiling. It is proper profiling based on real factors that make professional, trained profilers think you need extra scrutiny. They don't mark muslims for extra scrutiny because they are muslims. They mark people who act nervous and like they have something to hide for extra scrutiny.

There is nothing wrong with proper profiling. It is a very useful tool. Unfortunately in the US, profiling means having a poorly trained, poorly paid TSA agent check anyone who is brown. To proper profile you need intelligent, well trained profilers, which the US won't pay for.

Yeah, if I come up to you and question why my Tazer and beating-stick make you nervous while I'm brandishing them at you, you're gonna feel nervous

The people doing the profiling apparently aren't even in uniform, they're just ordinary-seeming people who start talking with you. Almost like professionals can also think of problems that you can think of in 30 seconds, or something.

The US spends $8 per passenger flight. The Israeli's spend $80.
So, all you need to do is find 50-60 billion dollars a year to get the US up to Israel's standard. Or you could be a realist, and determine that it's not worth it.

Israel doesn't have near as many flights as the US... so I'd imagine there would be some benefits of scale if we were to adopt even some of their methods that would not make it an $80 per passenger cost.

That kind of process is people-intensive; there just aren't that many ways to get economies of scale out of a larger version. But even if you were able to only double the TSA's budget, that's still another eight billion dollars a year.

The threat in the US simply isn't that great - that money would be much better spent somewhere else. As it is right now, the TSA is probably cau

AC writes, "The US spends $8 per passenger flight. The Israeli's spend $80. So, all you need to do is find 50-60 billion dollars a year to get the US up to Israel's standard. Or you could be a realist, and determine that it's not worth it."

If the US can't find sixty billion dollars a year to spend on airport security but can find one trillion dollars a year to spend on blowing the crap out of foreign countries, the US needs better accountants.

If the US can't find sixty billion dollars a year to spend on airport security but can find one trillion dollars a year to spend on blowing the crap out of foreign countries, the US needs better accountants.

The US wouldn't need sixty billion dollars a year to spend on airport security if it stops spending one trillion dollars a year on blowing the crap out of foreign countries, the US needs better leaders.

So, all you need to do is find 50-60 billion dollars a year to get the US up to Israel's standard.

It would cost a lot more than that.

Airports would have to be completely redesigned to provide massive security processing halls, staffed by hundreds, if not thousands, of security personnel to handle the high volumes of US air travel at major airports. Passengers would also have to be willing to accept 1-2 hours going through security as a norm, with particularly busy times and days being even worse. They would also have to accept having all of their bags hand-searched and being questioned about any unusu

Or would you have preferred me to expand upon it by pointing out ads in the back of magazines that would offer to sell you a cheap metal detector which was in fact just a 'stud finder'... both rely on certain assumptions that may be true at the time of implementation but that are subject to change.

Yes... many other things set off metal detectors... and with that kind

Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.

I smell billions of dollars getting wasted on attempting to prevent the inevitable in our future just like billions have been wasted on copyrights to preserve failing business models.

Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.

But governments can control the composition, sale and distribution of the raw materials needed to print a practical plastic weapon.

It might be possible to chemically tag these materials, as explosives are tagged.

The guns are made out of ABS. While, to my knowledge, 3D printer machines use small ABS pellets, I assume they could be made from shavings of other shapes, and there's enough LEGO in the market that rogue gun makers could buy second-hand parts to melt down for decades.

I think a "printed 3D gun" is far more likely to have a few metal parts milled - but the whole thing is pointless.

If you live in a city, right now there a shop with a CnC mill in your city putting on a "make your own gun" event. It's moderately priced and straightforward, with an existing legal framework. There's probably a 4th of July special.

It does require special parts that aren't milled, and are pretty much only sold for the purpose of making your own gun, and are still legal. You can't sell the gun

it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.

It's worth noting that one of the first applications of Copyright law outside of books was to the proliferation of illegal 2D patterns. Weave patterns used in cloth textiles were determined to be protected by copyright (technically they still are, but most common patterns are in the public domain now).

And of course, like drugs, murder and copyright circumvention, the fact that it's banned means it longer happens. Thus, security officers don't need to take it into consideration when securing an area.

I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this.

Too late. Bend over, Citizen. We need to search you for any remaining decency you may be hiding. If you don't, you're a filthy anti-american terrorist. Your freedom is very important to us... which is why we're taking it away.

Is the availability of 3D printing. The plastics needed to make single use firearms exist to make them much stronger than the "junk" used in 3D printers. Furthermore, a plastic bottle of 5 lbs of gun powder doesn't set off a metal detector either. You don't even need a 3D printer to make that.

The truth of the matter is if you are able to get within a few feet of someone, you don't need a 3D printer or any other fancy machines to make a weapon to kill said person.

a plastic bottle of 5 lbs of gun powder doesn't set off a metal detector either.

Neither does a ceramic canister of high explosives.(which would be far more destructive than a plastic gunpowder device) Which is why the TSA looks at your naked body at the airport. Either way, the privacy and decency of sane and innocent individuals will be shredded and reduced to sawdust moistened with the tears of our founding fathers.

The difference is the means of manufacture. Manufacturing guns used to mean specialist equipment, specialist suppliers. They could be tracked, their activities monitored, and authorities could be sure they were only manufacturing legal (ie: detectable) weapons. The easy accessibility of 3D printing means that every basement in the world is now a potential (albeit, crappy) gunsmithy. Decentralization of manufacture means that tracking and monitoring no longer cut it to keep tabs on production.

The term "zip gun" isn't particularly well-defined - it usually just means an improvised gun, put together with whatever parts are around. 3D printed guns don't really meet that definition. Besides, 3D printing is in its infancy. Yeah, the Liberator, is a one-shot gun just as likely to take out the shooter's fingers as it is the target, but it's also the very first iteration of these things. People aren't reacting to the capability of 3D-printed guns now, they're trying to anticipate the impact of 3D printe

How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.

I told the CO that I could kill the guy with my thumb. He's about 5'4" and 125 pounds compared to my 6'1" and 250 pounds.

Isn't the middle east more of a 'bomb violence' neighborhood than a 'gun violence' one? It seems like there isn't much point in smuggling in the world's shittiest pistol when widely available techniques for bringing in enough explosives to spatter the audience far and wide are available...

Guns, especially guns of this sort, are easier to conceal, work at a distance and are lighter than the 5-10kg of C4 you would need to haul in past the guards in order to harm the speaker from where they were comfortably sitting. And the bomb scenario carries with it the price of not being able to view your accomplishment because the brain you use in order to perform said observation will be spattered across the ceiling.

Guns, especially guns of this sort, are easier to conceal, work at a distance and are lighter than the 5-10kg of C4 you would need to haul in past the guards in order to harm the speaker from where they were comfortably sitting. And the bomb scenario carries with it the price of not being able to view your accomplishment because the brain you use in order to perform said observation will be spattered across the ceiling.

I strongly suspect a potential assassin in the Israel parliament would not have a long life expectancy no matter what technique was used.

Depends on ethniticity, I suspect. Remember, the last time Israel lost a Prime Minister (equivalent to US President, sort of) was relatively recently -- in the mid-90's. The assassin shot the PM in the middle of a crowd. He survived. He was arrested. He was tried. He's in jail now.

I strongly suspect a potential assassin in the Israel parliament would not have a long life expectancy no matter what technique was used.

So? You assume that all assassins wish to get away free and clear after their deed. Some do (mostly state actors)... others are more than willing to die shortly after they've taken their shot/explosion.

What is all the hype with saying LOOK ITS MADE OF PLASTIC!!! I SMUGGLED IT IN!!! No kidding... its made of something they don't detect... I hope people who sit there and do this get executed. All you are doing is pushing the envelope for them to regulate 3d printers. Thank you for your contributions.

I don't see why 3d printed guns are such a big deal. It isn't like making a gun is difficult. People in prisons(limited materials) have made zip guns before. To me, it sounds like there's a group of people who feel threatened by 3d printers. They're probably manufacturing folk doing everything in their power to keep printers from catching on. I mean why else would people be trying to do so much anti PR against 3d printers? It is no great feat to make a gun without a 3d printer.

The whole point about weapons is intent. It's never so convenient as portrayed by government, to be the simple presence of a weapon. Who is to say that the intent of person with the weapon is other than to preserve the life of the prime minister, the king, the president? Who gets to say that simply because a weapon is present that the worst possible scenario is the only possible one?

To the AC that asked about the 'bullet,' PLEASE, you've been misled. Maybe even consistently. The bullet is the part that comes out of the barrel at high velocity. What you (perhaps) meant to say is "Don't they also need ammunition?" It's a 'round of ammunition' or it's a 'cartridge.' Don't be misled by media morons and ask about 'bullets.' I've visited many gun stores where you can buy bullets. They're quite necessary if you're going to reload ammo. One store in Rapid City SD was particularly awesome. They had lots of 750 gr..50 cal bullets–in a barrel. They were expensive, but then if you shoot.50 BMG, it's an expensive hobby. I still wish I'd bought a few, just as souvenirs.

in colloquial usage bullet and ammo are interchangeable for the same thing.

No, this isn't true. The only demographic among which that mis-use is common is the group that has no idea what they're talking about. The millions and millions of people who've been in the military or who personally own and use firearms, and pretty much anybody literate who's ever read a coherent sentence on the subject, would never make that stupid mistake.

It's sort of like how "the web" and "the internet" aren't the same thing.

True, indeed.Mankind has been using objects and materials found around him to kill his fellow man for tens of thousands of years, non-stop.Dead is just as dead, whether it's from being shot with a 3D printed gun, or from being bashed in the head by a rock. The specific tool used is pointless to worry about....the intent to kill is the only thing that really matters.

The most dangerous weapon is, and always has been, the human mind.Good luck trying to control and regulate that!

So granted, they got a piece of plastic in the shape of a gun through security. The article says "a plastic pistol shooting live ammunition" but doesn't say whether any ammunition was actually present. Why is this important? Because the ammunition contains metal, (and propellant. Surely they're testing for chemical agents) and I'd be interested in whether they could get *that* through security. I suspect not.

Overall, I can see where this could cause a furor, but it'd be just as easy, for instance, to get an all plastic/rubber crossbow into the chamber, with the added advantage that an arrow can defeat Kevlar soft armor. (An arrow tip is just a bit of metal, which could be disguised as a variety of innocuous things.) There's always a way, given enough determination, which is why experienced security personnel are on the lookout even in a supposedly secured location.

It strikes me that a 3D printed gun doesn't need to actually look like a gun at all. Indeed, a 3D printed gun could use colors/markings and form of existing toy guns (a nerf gun that fires real bullets!), or perhaps it could look like a toy dinosaur that actually shoots bullets from its head. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but it never occurred to me during all these discussions about 3D printed guns. Something like this puts security/police/secret service officers facing people armed "toys" in a terrible position.

I would not chance a brain dead stunt like this to test the security of a high school in Nebraska.

I say brave because had they been caught pulling this stunt, which involved taking their toy out of the bag while sitting in the audience of a speech by the prime minister, they would have faced some real steel.

A friend of my dad's tells a fun story. He went back to Israel in the mid 90's for a short visit (he's Israeli, but living in the US), and went for a little hike in the desert. While hiking, he found a spent anti-tank missile tube -- sort of like the launcher tube for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_antitank_missile [wikipedia.org]. He thought that was pretty cool, so he took it with him.

I may have missed something in the translation but I saw no mention of ammunition getting past security. Unless the ammunition was also made of plastic then a metal detector would still find a loaded firearm.

Try again with a loaded plastic gun, let us know how that works out for you.

Now, assume for a minute that even a loaded 3D printed gun can get past security. What do we do about it then? Perhaps we should arm the good guys inside the security perimeter so that they can shoot back should a bad guy with a gun get in.

Gun free zones are free killing zones. Every mass shooting I can recall, except one [wikipedia.org], happened in a gun free zone. Problem is that when (not if) a murderer gets inside that gun free zone there is no one that can shoot back. When armed good people are present someone might still get killed but it's also quite certain the murderer will be among the people shot.

I don't get this fascination with using computer controlled additive manufacturing to produce shitty firearms. If you want to use computer controlled manufacturing to produce firearms, better to get a CNC mill and use subtractive methods. Golmatic [emcomachinetools.co.uk] used to have a gallery of CNC manufactured firearms parts (out of steel, which actually works!). Looks like they're using trains [golmatic.net] now.

This is nothing but scaremongering to spook the masses about the evils of the latest technology. Of course the article fails to mention that people have been improving guns out of secondary materials in places from prisons to school yards for decades. They also fail to properly highlight the fact that the 'gun' blew up when fired and would have maimed the person actually attempting to use it.

The only person that should be scared by this article is the person foolish enough to spend several times the cost of

The plastic bullet/cased 762 I mention in the other reply can easily kill - not out to hundreds of yards like a metal bullet in the same chambering, but plenty far out. A small rod approximately.3 inches in diameter, weighing 4 or 5 grams, with a pointed front end moving at mach 2 or so is not something I would want to have pointed at me.

German training ammo in 762x51 (aka 762 NATO aka 308 Winchester) has both plastic (mostly... the base is metal) case and bullet. A special bolt and bolt carrier was used in the G3 (HK91) to fire it as training ammo.

Interestingly enough, the Israelis produced a brass cased *wooden* bullet in the same caliber for training purposes, using war captured German Mausers.

Then you need to stand up and be heard that you will not accept your government tightening its grip and abrogating your freedoms in a misguided attempt to stop a very vague threat that simply can't be legislated or regulated away.